Changing your URL Structure

What We'll Cover

Having descriptive URLs help with SEO and can improve your store's ranking in search engines. You can control how these appear in URL Structure settings. The default options are all primed to be SEO-friendly, but which one is best for your business depends on your industry.

Changing the URL Structure

1. When you have decided which option best suits your business, select it from the list. If you select Custom, see our instructions below on Configuring custom URLs.

2. Click Save.

3. Click Update Product URLs.

4. Select which URLs you would like to update. You can choose to update only URLs you have not customized or all URLs, including those you have already customized. Check the box if you want to create 301 redirects for old URLs.

5. Click Update URLs. Once the updates are complete, click Close, then check your storefront pages to confirm that the URL changes have taken effect.

Configuring Custom URL Structure

You can use Custom URL structures to include placeholders that are not included in the default URL structure options, such as product SKUs.

Be careful! Incorrectly modifying your store’s URLs can have a drastic impact on your SEO. If you are at all unsure about whether or not you should use custom URL formats, we highly recommend leaving them set to SEO Optimized (Short).

1. Select Custom.

2. Enter the custom URL format, using a combination of the available placeholders separated by forward slashes /. The custom URL string should also begin with a forward slash /.

Placeholder Types

Each page type has a list of placeholders that are available to use. You can arrange them in any order.

Product Pages:

%productname% — the name of the product

%category% — the first category this product appears in

%sku% — the product code/SKU

%upc% — the product UPC (Universal Product Code)

Can I show all the categories that contain the product? The Category placeholder will only show the first main category the product is listed in. To show the different categories on a product page, see our article on Product Page Breadcrumbs.